Communication Gateway to legacy Factory Floor LCM-4 system

Okay, I know everyone has moved on and is having an EPIC time these days but meanwhile some of us are still in the weeds trying to support old legacy systems and equipment :frowning:

We have an existing, extremely mission critical system using two SNAP-LCM4 controllers (with M4SENET-100 ethernet cards). They currently communicate to a single computer workstation running a Factory Floor Optodisplay HMI to support non-critical monitoring of this system. We have the spare legacy hardware (controllers I/O etc) to support this system for the foreseeable future which is good because replacing it would be extremely onerous due to the amount of regulatory approval required for a new system. However, we are hoping to add further automation to this site using current PAC hardware and HMI software and would still like to have one integrated PAC-Display HMI.

So what I am wondering is if anyone has come up with a way to use either Soft-PAC or a physical SNAP-PAC-S2 or EPIC controller to act as a Ethernet communication gateway between a legacy Factory Floor network and a PAC-Display HMI. I know I could use serial communication as in this example: Move data from your old controller into a PAC - via serial connection RS232/RS485 but was hoping there was a way to use ethernet instead due to the much higher data transfer capacity.

Brad,
if I understand you correct, you want to get data from your SNAP-LCM4 controller into PAC Display?

PAC Display Pro supports both, OptoControl based controllers if they use Ethernet as the Host Port communication link, and the SNAP-PAC series controllers.

When you configure a control engine in PAC Display Pro, you can select if the control engine Tag source is a .cdb (OptoControl) or a .idb (PAC Control) file.

This should do the job for you. You can develop a PAC Display Pro project that talks to your legacy SNAP-LCM4 and to a newer SNAP-PAC controller.

Wow thanks Gerhard, I didn’t think that was possible.

After I posted my question I found all the Legacy manuals in the PAC Project folder but it wasn’t very clear to me what versions of what legacy hardware and software (Factory Floor, ioProject) will work together. All of Opto22s brochures I found on supporting legacy products only seem to talk about supporting old I/O (by installing new SNAP controllers and updating to PAC Control software) but did not mention any possibility of using old controllers (specifically the SNAP-LCM4) still running OptoControl strategies.

I will definitely need to play with this in our office and see if there are any glitches. If that works, that would be brilliant!

You have to use the Pro version of PAC Display to get this feature. It should be mentioned in the PAC Display manual.